Pricing Gun Owners Out Of Their Constitutional Rights

Anti-gunners new move. Trying to get guns priced out of Constitutional Rights.

Rather than repeal the Second Amendment, liberals make exercising it too expensive.

The war on the Sec­ond Amend­ment is becom­ing all about cost.

Real­iz­ing it’s far eas­i­er to make exer­cis­ing one’s Sec­ond Amend­ment right pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive than it is to revoke that right entire­ly, lib­er­als across Amer­i­ca are find­ing ways to increase the cost of gun own­er­ship.

“This is about … pric­ing peo­ple out of their con­sti­tu­tion­al right to have a con­cealed car­ry per­mit”

Cal­i­for­nia is the lat­est state to jack up the cost of free­dom beyond the reach of the aver­age Amer­i­can. The Cal­i­for­nia Assem­bly sent a bill to Gov. Jer­ry Brown Tues­day which would allow cities and coun­ties to raise the cost of con­cealed car­ry per­mits beyond their cur­rent $100 lim­it.

The bill was intro­duced by Assem­bly­man Kevin McCar­ty (D-Sacra­men­to), who claimed it was mere­ly a way to help local gov­ern­ments bal­ance their bud­gets. Repub­li­can oppo­nents, how­ev­er, say the move is an obvi­ous attempt to hit the Sec­ond Amend­ment by hit­ting cit­i­zens’ wal­lets.

“What this is about [is] pric­ing peo­ple out of their con­sti­tu­tion­al right to have a con­cealed car­ry per­mit,” said Assem­bly­woman Melis­sa Melende (R-Lake Elsi­nore). And indeed, McCar­ty just so hap­pens to rep­re­sent the same coun­ty of which Scott Jones is sher­iff. Jones has been one of the state’s most pro­lif­ic issuers of con­cealed car­ry per­mits, grant­i­ng them by the thou­sands.

“The whole point that I have tried to make in my book, ‘The War On Guns,’ is that there has been a sys­tem­at­ic effort to make it more expen­sive for law-abid­ing cit­i­zens to pur­chase guns,” said John Lott, direc­tor of the Crime Pre­ven­tion Research Cen­ter.

Cal­i­for­nia and Wash­ing­ton, D.C. are not the only gov­ern­ments to try to make gun own­er­ship too expen­sive for the com­mon man — and rais­ing con­cealed car­ry per­mit and back­ground check appli­ca­tion fees is not the only way to do so. In 2002, New Jer­sey passed a law which man­dat­ed that every firearm in the state must have smart gun tech­nol­o­gy with­in three years of the first retail of a smart gun any­where in the U.S. Recent­ly the state leg­is­la­ture passed a sep­a­rate law, vetoed by Gov. Chris Christie, which required gun stores to start stock­ing smart guns.

As part of its exec­u­tive action on gun con­trol, the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion announced it is work­ing with state and local law enforce­ment agen­cies to draft pre­lim­i­nary guide­lines for smart gun use in law enforce­ment that could influ­ence how man­u­fac­tur­ers pro­duce weapons for that mar­ket.

But smart gun tech­nol­o­gy is absurd­ly expen­sive — and these costs would inevitably be passed on to the con­sumer. Firearms com­pa­ny Moss­berg has devel­oped some of the most promis­ing smart-gun tech­nol­o­gy and implant­ed it in a shot­gun.

How­ev­er, the com­pa­ny esti­mates it would need $5 mil­lion to build 25 to 30 hand­guns for test­ing and anoth­er $15 mil­lion could launch it into full pro­duc­tion. If each pro­to­type costs $200,000 to make, one can only imag­ine the future retail price tag.

If gun grab­bers can’t find ways to make buy­ing guns pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive, they find ways to make mak­ing guns pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive. Hillary Clin­ton has pledged to make gun man­u­fac­tur­ers liable for crimes com­mit­ted using their prod­ucts. This would open up the man­u­fac­tur­ers to friv­o­lous law­suits that could dri­ve many out of busi­ness.

Obama’s State Depart­ment issued Direc­torate of Defense Trade Con­trols (DDTC) reg­u­la­tions which treat small inde­pen­dent gun­smiths like major firearms man­u­fac­tur­ers. These inde­pen­dent gun­smithing oper­a­tions are often as small as one man in his garage doing the occa­sion­al work — but they will now have to pay the same $2,250 annu­al fee as if they were Spring­field, Colt, or Ruger. Requir­ing these indi­vid­u­als and small busi­ness­es to pay $2,250 each year will dri­ve many of them out of busi­ness or onto the black mar­ket.

The Left has learned that the best way to stop peo­ple from exer­cis­ing a right is to make doing so pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive.